Oct 28th, 2009
Autumn Nature Table
I’ve been reading The Wonderful Weekend Book, by Elspeth Thompson. It’s full of great ideas on simple, feel-good type things that you might want to do at the weekend, like writing letters, having a real fire and baking bread. I think you’d go a bit mad if you did all of the things that Elspeth suggests - after all Homebase do do quite a nice line in chocolate croissants. But one thing she suggested did catch my eye - ‘create a nature table’.
Why not? So when the rain cleared we donned our wellies and off we went. Where I live is quite rural so, we didn’t have to go far before we started to find lots of natury type stuff. We found leaves of every Autumn colour, spiky horsechestnuts, acorns, feathers and even mushrooms. We had great fun.
What I realised is that all this stuff had been on the floor every time we’d been on a walk recently, I just hadn’t bothered to pick it up or even notice it really. And when you bring it indoors it takes on a whole different look.
We took it all back home and ‘played’ with it for a while. I even tried to identify some of the leaves but soon realised that I couldn’t and turned to Google to help me out - very smart that Google.
We arranged our stuff on a tray and put it on the window-ledge. The next day however, our nature table didn’t look so great. The leaves had shrivelled up and some little grub-like things had come out of the mushroom. Hmmm… Oh well, still a wholesome activity.
